


Imagination's a Bitch

by NaoNazo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, Not Romance, OFC - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 08:02:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2101863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NaoNazo/pseuds/NaoNazo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after S3E5, "Bedtime Stories." Sam starts having dreams that lead him to a possible way out of Dean's deal. The catch? The answer lies in a ten-year-old kidnapping case... and the primary witness is not what she seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They've barely played for ten minutes when Aaron throws his hands up and stomps away to the neighbors' house. He mutters something about stupid girls wanting to play stupid imaginary games, but he still leaves his sweater for her to sit on. She can't get up to follow him because she's being a mermaid captured by an evil octopus and she needs to decide what color her tail is and the jewels in it before she can beat up the octopus and get badly wounded while escaping. Also her skin gets itchy and red if she lays in the grass, so she stays on her brother's school sweater and runs her fingers over the prickly new-cut green blades of their front yard and thinks of colors. Mommy is inside but the front door is open and she can hear her voice rising and falling on the phone- no words she cares about, just the lilt like when Mommy reads long passages from the Hobbit at bedtime.

She looks at her legs stretched out on the sweater, bruise-blotchy knees bare below her soccer shorts, and blinks hard until she can almost see them as a tail. Imagination is making pictures for yourself, and she is going to be the most imaginative girl in kindergarten if it kills her. She'll show everyone her tail and they'll want to be her friend just like that.

She wants to go across the street to play with Aaron and the neighbor kids, but she's not allowed to leave the yard by herself. Besides, one time she followed Aaron after he gave up playing and he said she was the ugliest girl in the world and never apologized, even when she cried. So she sits and blinks at her legs and listens to Mommy's voice from the house.

It's warm out, not hot like it was the day they went to the beach and days after her skin was peeling off like dried Elmer's glue, but hot enough she feels heavy and sleepy. Can't fall asleep on the grass, though, not unless she wants to be taking oatmeal baths for the next week.

She rolls to her feet and wraps the sweater around her waist in case she wants to sit down again, and something falls out of the big pocket on the front. Several round somethings that catch the light where they lie nestled in the grass like Easter Eggs. Four whole quarters. They're Aaron's, probably, but she's not too bothered by it. He can always get more from the change jar on the counter. No, these quarters are hers now, the price of his leaving to play with someone else. She scoops them up in one hand and jangles them about to hear their happy coin sound. Maybe if she hides them now, Aaron won't even remember they were there.

Just then the most perfect sound starts, far away but growing stronger, getting closer. She grins and closes a fist around the quarters. This is going to be even better than hiding the coins from Aaron. He'll never know, now...

She's running towards the sound, panting as she draws up to the white truck covered in stickers, and holds up the money so the man knows someone is there. She's the second tallest girl in kindergarten, but she still has to bounce on her toes to see over the edge of the window sill so she can show the ice cream man the quarters.

"Are your parents around?" the ice cream man asks. She bounces a little higher to see the way his smile stays on his face when he talks, almost like it's a painted-on clown smile. She's not supposed to talk to strangers, so she just shakes her head and rests her hand on the window sill, letting the quarters slip a little in her sweaty palm.

"Kid, come a little closer and tell me what you want," he says, his voice going quieter like it's pulling at her. She starts to step back a little, maybe run back to her own yard, but he reaches back, back, back behind him and pulls out a fudgsicle. As soon as she sees it, she can taste it melting on her tongue, she wants it so much. He wraps his big cold hand around her coins, hand and all, and reaches out with the other, the fudgsicle. She puts up a hand for it, but he keeps reaching until he touches her forehead with two fingertips like icicles and whispers something that sounds slithery. She pulls her hand away and rubs the water from her forehead, then grabs the fudgsicle with both hands. The ice cream man winks at her with no change in his smile and as she runs back to her own grass, he calls out, "See you soon!"

She reaches the front of their lawn and throws herself down to eat, a mermaid who wrestled with a cold, scary octopus and fought free. Half an hour later when Aaron trudges back, the fudgsicle is a smear of sticky chocolate on her cheeks. He shouts at her for stealing his quarters because one of them had a state on it.

Several hours later, she and Aaron are tucked into bed in their adjoining rooms and Aaron still won't talk to her, not even to say goodnight and don't let the bedbugs bite. 

The next morning, she is gone without a trace.

Five days later, she is back, but... different.

Ten years later, Sam Winchester awakes from a dream about a cold room and a man with a painted-on smile. He can still taste the bitter remnants of chocolate on the back of his tongue.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Dude, lighten up. We just stopped a little not-dead girl from fairy-tale-ing people to death. Life is good," Dean offered. Sam's glare could have stripped paint.
> 
> "I'm not doing this, Dean," he gritted out. "You can act like nothing's wrong, but I can't just sit here and make stupid jokes when you're DYING." So maybe his voice got a little loud at the end. From the corner of his eye, he could see people at nearby tables rubber-necking at Dean like they could see what was killing him. He'd had enough.  
> ================================================

The first time he had the dream, he barely remembered it the next morning, when he and Dean were back on the road, the silence between them growing heavier, clinging in the air like the smell of burning plastic. Sam had to stop himself from breathing through his mouth, like he could try to filter the words that go unsaid, setting them on his tongue so they won't choke when they reach his throat. He stopped himself because if he opened his mouth, he couldn't control what came out-- more bitterness, more guilt, more desperation Dean didn't want to hear. He's sick of hearing his words twisted into the puling whine of a little brother, of the chubby little idiot he used to be before he grew up and learned he'd have to save himself-- not from the monsters in the darkness, but from the stupid, self-sacrificial crap Dean would pull to keep him safe. He tasted bile in his throat when he thought back to the kid he used to be, in the dark, happy at the expense of the only person who bothered to see him as anything other than a soldier-to-be. Sam had thought they were a team, finally equal, after Jess-- after he rejoined the hunt. But obviously, he'd been wrong about that.

 

He was so caught up trying to keep himself from puking out his hurt and frustration, he barely noticed when they stopped for lunch.

C'mon Sammy, who spit in your coffee? That waitress has been eyeing you the entire time and you've barely even checked out her ass!" Dean's voice cut through Sam's fog, but did nothing to raise his spirits. The waitress, several tables away, turned around to give them both a dirty look before jotting down an order. Sam groaned. Dean waggled his eyebrows, trying to get a rise out of his mopey younger brother. When that only yielded a half-hearted glare, he rolled his eyes and huffed out a long-suffering sigh.

 

"Dude, lighten up. We just stopped a little not-dead girl from fairy-tale-ing people to death. Life is good," Dean offered. Sam's glare could have stripped paint.

 

"I'm not doing this, Dean," he gritted out. "You can act like nothing's wrong, but I can't just sit here and make stupid jokes when you're DYING." So maybe his voice rose a bit at the end. From the corners of his eyes, he could see people in the neighboring booths rubber-necking like they could see into Dean, find the script on his soul with the date coming due.

 

"Way to tell the whole neighborhood," Dean shot back. He stuffed the last of his burger in his mouth, slapped some bills down on the table and left without a backward glance. Sam bit his lip hard and curled and uncurled his fists, which buzzed and tingled dizzily. When he was mostly sure he could keep from decking Dean, he walked out to find his brother lounging sullenly against the Impala. And that was the end of any conversation for that day.

__________

 

The second time he had the dream, he wasn't asleep. Technically, it might have been the third time... He'd woken up with the same taste in his mouth, the same tune rattling in his ears, like there was an animatronic bird singing on his shoulder. It sounded a little like "Turkey in the Straw," which he would never admit to knowing because Dean still made fun of him for joining choir at one of their schools in the fifth grade. He found himself humming while getting ready to take the first shower, until a well-aimed pillow caught him in the back of the head.

 

"Stop singing the damn ice-cream song, it's making me hungry," Dean growled, then rolled over again. "And give me back my pillow." It landed with a satisfying whump on his shoulder, and Sam shrugged off the flash of familiarity that had shot through him at Dean's words. Must have been a memory from childhood, or a scene from a movie he saw once when he was half-asleep.

 

As always, he had to bend his knees in the shower so the stream of water had a chance to hit somewhere higher than the middle of his back. Sometimes he longs for his dorm at Stanford, and his apartment with Jessie-- there was something about being able to stretch to his full height and lean back into a steady stream of water that had made those few years feel more like home than any of the places he and Dean had stayed as kids. Now he was back to slouching into showers and folding himself into the Impala, as if by rounding his shoulders and shrinking his body language he could somehow fit into the life he'd tried so hard to out-grow.

 

Sam was at the tricky stage of rinsing the suds from his hair, leaning precariously backwards to keep the trickles of shampoo from running down his forehead, when a crash from the other room yanked him upright. For a second he was sure something had cleaved the top of his head right of-- there was a cold line of pain at the start of his scalp and nothing else. For a second, he choked on the water beating against his upturned face, sagging against the wet wall to keep from slipping. Then he was--

 

_shivering in the back of a car that used to mean happiness, dressed in little princess pajamas and clinging to Aaron's sweater like drowning men cling to life floats. The vehicle doesn't sing anymore, but growls and vibrates through her skin. Her eyes are swollen nearly shut with crying and her mouth is full of something dusty and dry and gross and she's only keeping herself from screaming since the scary man looked at her and smiled and said if she made one-little-peep, he'd go back and kill her family. The growling and vibrating stops and the scary man pulls her out of the car and into a dark building, takes her down, down, down a staircase and shoves her into a room at the end of a gross-smelling hall. He closes the door before she can try to stand up. The lock snicks and behind her, she can hear someone else **breathing.**_

 

"Son of a bitch!" Dean's curse startled him from the-- memory? vision?-- so thoroughly he could hardly tell how long he'd been out of it. Sam took his time finishing his shower, and squeezed most of the water from his hair before checking on his brother. Hunting together for most of their lives had taught him early on to recognize the different tones of Dean's favorite curse word. This time sounded like minor irritation.

 

When he exited the bathroom, Dean was occupied with his duffle, pulling out a wrinkled shirt and jeans to change into. The motel's dusty black radio/ alarm clock thing was on the floor in pieces. Before Sam could do more than raise an eyebrow, Dean said, "It was playing Hannah Montana," like that excused everything.

 

"Miley Cyrus," Sam corrected, before his brain could catch up with his mouth. Dean turned around with an open-mouthed expression of pure glee and started cackling. 

 

"No, no, please explain. College boy listens to MILEY CYRUS? And you make fun of MY music?"

 

Sam looked away. In a flat tone, he said, "Jess had an old CD." Memories of his girlfriend dancing around their apartment, shaking her blond hair behind her goofily, clogged in his throat. He cleared it and continued. "She used to play it during all-nighters to stay awake..." Dean nodded once and turned back to his duffle, too uncomfortable to say anything. Sighing, Sam pulled on some clothes and booted up his laptop, desperate for a hunt of something that might lead to a way out of Dean's deal. Might as well wish for a mermaid while he was at it. 

 

Something jogged in his mind and he saw it, just for a flash. A sweater on a lawn, letters barely visible where they framed knobby legs. Without really intending to, he typed out the words as they came... LOYOLA ELEMENTARY... and pressed search. The first couple results were school reviews and newspaper articles and his eyes zeroed in on one that blared, "Loyola student's miraculous recovery sparks school pride parade." When he clicked on the link, his breath burst out of his lungs like he'd been punched.

In hunting, and especially in their lives, there are no such things as miracles or coincidences. He could see maybe hearing the name of a random tiny school in California and having it pop into his dream. He could even stretch his imagination to maybe having a dream about being a student from that school. What he couldn't find a rational explanation for was how he could have accurately dreamed up the exact design, color and frickin' mascot on the sweaters that every student in the school photo was proudly wearing. Which meant it wasn't a dream. For a moment, Sam stares at the sweaters and unfocuses his eyes and remembers without believing about being a little girl stuck in a room with someone else breathing behind him, an ice cream truck man touching her forehead with his cold fingers, and desperate small hands grabbing onto her brother's sweater as she was taken. It feels like something that happened already, so he can't figure out why he's seeing it now.

 

Sam sat back in his chair and pulled his fingers through his hair. He had been done with the psychic powers, completely clean, no dreams since... well, since he died and came back. Azazel and all the other special kids were dead! He was supposed to be back to normal, as human as he could be with demon blood in his veins.

 

As if on cue, Dean started warbling madly in the shower. Sam startled and banged his knee on the table. Hissing in pain, he leaned back to the computer and started researching Loyola, the surrounding town, anything weird he could find. He couldn't ignore the dream-- bad things happened when he ignored what his powers were trying to tell him. But he couldn't let Dean know about it. If his brother found out something was triggering his "freaky psychic shit" again, he'd take him to Bobby's and not let him out of the warded house for months. It would be just like Dean to completely lose his shit over something maybe happening to Sam and completely ignore the ticking clock on his own life. So, he had to get them to Nowheresville California to find out what his vision was trying to tell him. Without Dean figuring out why they were going there. Which meant... he cracked his fingers and pulled up everything he could find about kidnappings in that town, finally hitting on a string of child disappearances a decade ago. He searched for ice cream men and found nothing. Finally, out of desperation, he went back to the first article he found-- "nothing is a miracle," he muttered to himself, and Dean looked up briefly from where he sat polishing his Colt-- and hunted for any other strange illnesses or recoveries within the past ten years. Abruptly, he hit pay dirt.

 

There were nine articles from ten years ago, all mentioning the seemingly miraculous recoveries of local children from fatal, even a few incurable diseases. They're all roughly around the same time as the disappearances of other local kids. No such thing as coincidence. 

 

Breathing a little easier now that he could almost pin down the weird, Sam sent an email with all the links he'd found to Bobby for a second pair of eyes, then shut his laptop and turned to Dean. "I found us a hunt. It's in California."


End file.
